Important Tips for WWDC

So this year will be enormego’s second time attending WWDC. In fact, we get the privilege this year of attending the conference along with our team mates over at Mobclix! It’s going to be a great conference as always and we’re very excited to get it started. Last year was our first year attending, and we learned a lot from other people posting blogs, so I figured it would be a good idea to transfer some of that knowledge along with some opinions to keep people refreshed, moving and less annoyed through the whole thing. So, pick and choose the advice as you will. Some of it is based on our needs for the conference so it’s not always 100% written in stone.

• Get your badge on Sunday to avoid the clusterf*ck that is Monday morning. You can head over to Moscone as late as 7pm on Sunday to pick it up.
  
  
• If you’re planning on bringing your MacBook, be sure to bring your “extension cable”. Apple is very good at providing power strips in every few rows, but you don’t want to be the ass who takes up 3 outlets with your charging brick.
• If you’re sitting in front of a power strip, be prepared to reach back, grab other people’s plugs and plug them in for them. 
  
  
• Between sessions, WiFi is useless because of how saturated the network gets. The best thing to do is to plug into the wired network via the few areas that you can. During the sessions, less people are on, so WiFi becomes more usable again. We avoid all of this by using our Sprint MiFi cards. If you have a 3G/4G card, thats your best bet. But avoid…
  
  
• AT&T. It was bad last year. You have a crapload of iPhones in one place sucking up the network and AT&T is not prepared to handle it. This year with the iPads, I can’t imagine it being much better. If you want to place phone calls/send text messages reliably, use a Verizon/Sprint device.
  
  
• Try to avoid carrying a lot of stuff. Bring a backpack and keep it light. You’ll be doing a lot of walking and when you’re sitting in the sessions, there’s not much room to put a massive bag under your chair because people go in and out all the time. This is your generic travel advice though. Travel light.
  
  
• The Keynote. Good luck. We lined up for the keynote around 9 last year and made it into an overflow room, but there were easily a thousand people behind us who didn’t make it in. Get in line early at Moscone or just have a good breakfast preparing for the week and then make your way over later to see the “State of ___” keynotes. These keynotes are pretty interesting and actually are jam packed with more surprises about less “jaw dropping” stuff that doesn’t make it into the main keynote.
  
  
• Apple provides a basic lunch for you along with snacks and drinks, but good luck finding a seat. As soon as the last session ends, you’ll need to make it down to the cafeteria or you won’t get a seat.
  
  
• Tweet the crap out of your location throughout the event. Let people know where you are, what you’re doing and what you’re doing at night. The biggest regret we have from last year is that we didn’t get to meet all of the people that we talk to all the time via Twitter and throughout our business.
  
  
• Don’t “push yourself” to go to every single session. The sessions are long and the conference is long. You’ll kill yourself by Wednesday. Pick the ones that you really really want to go to and go to those refreshed, wide eyed and ready to learn. The few that you miss you can catch on iTunes.
  
  
• Get to the sessions about 15 minutes before they start to ensure a decent seat and to find an outlet if you need it.
  
  
• “Intro” really means introduction. Apple designs the intro sessions to be super dumbed downed. In fact, even some of the “Expert” sessions are a bit dumbed downed. That doesn’t mean the intro sessions are to be avoided though. Sometimes it’s good to have a starter overview of something that you know so you can see if you’re screwing up something easy. (We had a few cases of that last year.)
  
  
• Invite people to dinner. The best time to meet up with people is at night and the parties aren’t very “good” for meeting people since they’re usually loud and extremely packed out. If you’re free at night, let people know that and tell them you want to get together for dinner.
  
  
• Friday is usually cool down day. If you have to leave town early, you’re not missing much on Friday.

That’s all for now. If I think of some more, I’ll be sure to edit my post. Have fun at WWDC and if you want to meet up with us/grab dinner, shoot us a Tweet at @enormego and we’ll set it up.